1 Samuel 15:1

1 Samuel 15:1-9. Saul's commission to destroy Amalek

1. Samuel also said And Samuel said. How long after the repulse of the Philistines this happened, we are not told. Some years at least must be allowed for the evident development of that wilfulness which was Saul's ruin.

The Lord sent me Me did Jehovah send. The pronoun stands emphatically at the head of the sentence. The prophet appeals to his former commission to anoint Saul as accrediting him to be God's messenger on the present occasion. "The note of special warning" with which he prefaces the command indicates that he felt that "the discipline of Saul's life was gathering itself up into a special trial," and that this would be "a crisis in that life-history, with which by God's own hand his own had been so strangely intertwined." Wilberforce's Heroes of Hebrew History, p. 219.